Friday, August 16, 2013

TSA Week in Review: 32 Firearms Discovered Last Week (24 Loaded)

32Firearms Discovered Last
Week – Of the 32
firearms, 24 were loaded and 11 had rounds chambered. See a complete list and
more photos at the bottom of this post.

Stun
Guns –14 stun
guns were discovered last week in carry-on bags around the nation. Four were
discovered at Denver (DEN), two at Las Vegas (LAS), two at Baltimore (BWI), and
one each at Anchorage (ANC), Chattanooga (CHA), San Francisco (SFO), San Juan
(SJU), Atlanta (ATL), and Seattle (SEA).

Items in the Strangest
Places –It’s
important to examine your bags prior to traveling to ensure no prohibited items
are inside. If a prohibited item is discovered in your bag, you could be cited
and quite possibly arrested by local law enforcement. Here are a few examples from
the past week where prohibited items were found in strange places.

Airsoft
Guns – Three
Airsoft guns were discovered in carry-on baggage last week at Long Beach (LGB),
Minneapolis St. Paul (MSP), and Seattle (SEA). Airsoft guns are prohibited in
carry-on bags, but allowed in checked baggage. Read this post for more
information: TSA Travel Tips Tuesday: Traveling with Airsoft Guns

Unfortunately
these sorts of occurrences are all too frequent which is why we talk about
these finds. Sure, it’s great to share the things that our officers are
finding, but at the same time, each time we find a dangerous item, the
throughput is slowed down and a passenger that likely had no ill intent ends up
with a citation or in some cases is even arrested. The passenger can face a
penalty as high as $7,500.00. This is a friendly reminder to please
leave these items at home. Just because we find a prohibited item on an
individual does not mean they had bad intentions, that's for the law
enforcement officer to decide. In many cases, people simply forgot they had
these items.

*In
order to provide a timely weekly update, I compile my data from a preliminary
report. The year-end numbers will vary slightly (increase) from what I report
in the weekly updates. However, any monthly, midyear, or end-of-year numbers
TSA provides on this blog or elsewhere will not be estimates.

28 comments:

Anonymous
said...

1,700,000 pax per day x 7 days = 11,900,000. Some are repeat flyers, so I'll be generous and round it down to 11,000,000.

TSA misses 7 out of 10 weapons that pass through screening, so if you found 32, then another 70 or so weapons were on board flights, but were not threats to aviation safety. Let's be generous (for once) to the flying public and say a total of 100 weapons were brought through screening.

Percent of passengers who perhaps should have been stopped to make sure they were complying with state and federal weapons laws: .0009%

No terrorists found. No planes fell from the sky because there was no threat in the first place.

The TSA unnecessarily searched 10,999,900 people last week and violated the privacy and rights of those 10,999,900 people.

Anonymous said...If the TSA inspections stop even one hijacking of an airliner then it is worth the invasion of privacy.August 17, 2013 at 11:08 AM

No, it is not. The passengers' wasted hours from every unnecessary search these past 13 years is staggering, in the hundreds of billions. This is time away from work and family.

The cost to American taxpayers so far is over $100 billion for this bloated agency.

Property lost, damaged, and stolen by screeners runs into the millions of dollars. A "few bad apples" who steal, intentionally break, and intentionally dump liquid and powder contents in passengers' baggage take and ruin our personal property, with no workable recourse. Report it? Sure, but nothing will be done to the screeners for a long time while they continue the thefts and breakage, and the TSA won't reimburse us for our property.

The assaults on our bodies, property, rights, and property under the guise of screening is beyond unaccetable. It's criminal and unconstitutional.

Hundreds of billions of dollars is not an acceptable cost to prevent one hijacking. In the US, a hijacker is likely to be severly injured by other passengers, and he can't access the cockpit anyway.

I wonder if you would think it was all worth it if the hijacking/bombing it prevented was the flight YOU were on...hmmmmm?

Comparing the screening process to a body cavity search is ridiculous. 90 percent of passengers are never touched, 99 percent of those who are patted down do not receive a full body pat down, unless they opt out of the scanner.

The cockpit doors have been hardened, and it's doubtful there could be another takeover like what occurred on 9/11 without the passengers interceding. The weapons they used would indeed be found by a metal detector. Terrorists have demonstrated their ingenuity trying to get around that by using explosives instead, as in the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber and the UK sports drink plot. Also look up Bojinka. The metal detector will never find any explosive secreted on the body, since they are not metals. That's why the body scanners were developed and the liquids we bring on the plane are limited.

I say lets have two lanes at every checkpoint. One lane for those who get it, and the other for all you whiners who don't want to be "raped" by having you body scanned or who can't figure out how to take you laptop out of your bag. That way I don't have to wait behind you while you make your point, or fumble though because you couldn't be bothered to read any signs or follow any verbal cues.

Sorry if that sounds a little mean-spirited, but the way I see it, the TSA is not the problem behind the hassle of getting through security at he airport.

Anonymous said..."If the TSA inspections stop even one hijacking of an airliner then it is worth the invasion of privacy."

Except, they don't. And due to the illusion of security, not to mention the increased highway travel, are responsible for making travel LESS safe, not more. They are nowhere near the cost, in annual budget, lost time, or increased fatalities on the road.

TSAnonymous said...I wonder if you would think it was all worth it if the hijacking/bombing it prevented was the flight YOU were on...hmmmmm?

No, I would not. Even if I was on a hijacked plane, it would not be worth the hundreds of bilions of dollars wasted and what even you admit is an "invasion of privacy." See, I'm not that selfish nor do I think I'm that special that millions of lives must be disrupted to keep up an illusion of safety.

Also, none of the examples you (and your TSA bretheren & apologists) always bring up were viable threats. The shoe guy and the unworkable liquid plot weren't even on flights originating in the US, so the TSA's lame rules wouldn't have meant a darn thing.

If you want an I'M SCARED! lane for you so the rest of us can go through a WTMD, leave our shoes on, laptops in our bag, and not be assaulted, that would be great. All of us would be happy and all of us would arrive safely, because the TSA is security theater.

And you know the nudiescope scanners have a failure rate of over 50%. That usually means innocent flyers are touched by a stranger, sometimes on the flyers' genitals, breasts, and buttocks. Also, the scanners can't see inside a body, so your claim that they are needed is false.

Finally, thank you for agreeing that the cockpit door is hardened, so a hijacker could not gain access to the cockpit. And that the passengers wouldn't meekly comply with an attempted hijacking.

Bob, the most recent post, by a Lauren Smith, clearly violates the commenting policy of, "We will not post comments that are spam, are clearly 'off topic' or that promote services or products." Did you not look at the link?

No shame in carrying a firearm Lauren--just don't try to carry it through the screening checkpoint please. There are plenty of roses in this country, and because I am a retired AF Colonel and an airport security coordinator, I intend to protect them. I agree with the anonymous contributor who called cease fire on the whining. Let it go--you all have become part of the problem and not the solution. You want to inject your witty comments into the fray with no knowledge of the threat or intelligence. It doesn't do anything but fan the fire and help those who intend to harm us. Please go to another website to spend your idle time--I use the data to learn for other airport's misfortune, and your all comments have been nothing but a constant distraction.

In this world of exploding clothing and the like, no safety measure is too extreme. The ideas of "privacy" pale in comparison of the need for safety. Any reasonable person will choose safety over privacy every time.

To all of you who think the TSA is a waste, you are humiliatingly wrong. As a former airline employee of 20+ years, I am thankful of the screening process. You can't blame the whole system on a few idiot TSA employees who misuse their power and go off the deep end. That's the nature of the beast. EVERY company in the world has those types of people.Whoever keeps posting the negative remarks "anonymously" is probably a disgruntled fired TSA employee or some type of million mile travelor who complains about everything anyway. You can't tell me that the type of screening we have today doesn't prevent hijackings or incidents. Funny how I don't hear anyone complaining about customs or police checkpoints. The people who are constantly "whining" on this website obviously had no one close to them affected by 911.As far as the delays go, most of the delays are not the fault of the screeners, it's the idiots who spend 30 minutes complaining to the screeners or the ones who always try to carry on things that are not allowed. That's what back up the lines.

Anon sez - "Bob, the most recent post, by a Lauren Smith, clearly violates the commenting policy of, "We will not post comments that are spam, are clearly 'off topic' or that promote services or products." Did you not look at the link?

Someone on the social media team sleeping on the job?"

Yup, thanks for catching that one for me there Anon, I missed it earlier, the problem has been rectified!

Anonymous said...In this world of exploding clothing and the like, no safety measure is too extreme. The ideas of "privacy" pale in comparison of the need for safety. Any reasonable person will choose safety over privacy every time.

August 19, 2013 at 10:14 AM

---------------------------------

Where do we draw the line on this? The only way to make sure people are not carrying dangerous items is to give them a full body pat down and swab them for explosives, and possibly have a cavity search. Would anybody be willing to endure that every time to fly? Since privacy isn't an issue with some people, would anybody be willing to allow their car and house to be searched?

As a traveler with an insulin pump, I get the full body "enhanced pat down" every time I fly in this country. My insulin pump can't go through the body scanners and it seems to set off the metal detector. That results in me getting touched in areas that only a doctor or my wife should be touching. I dread the day when the explosive detection swabs give a false positive for soap or lotion. I fly through airports without body scanners. Setting off the metal detector used to result in a scan with the hand held metal detector. Whatever happened to them?

I'm glad our founding fathers felt that way. Oh wait! No, they didn't. If they had, we'd still be under British rule. At this point, it's very debatable as to whether we'd be better off that way or not.

"Comparing the screening process to a body cavity search is ridiculous. 90 percent of passengers are never touched..."

Body cavity searches do not necessarily require physical contact. Stripping and squatting could be sufficient.

Since you did not answer the question, I will assume that your answer is No.

"In this world of exploding clothing and the like, no safety measure is too extreme. The ideas of "privacy" pale in comparison of the need for safety. Any reasonable person will choose safety over privacy every time."

Same question for you: Will you submit to a body cavity search to board an airplane?

If anything, the events of 9/11 show us that our old government failed to protect its subjects. Laws, too loose to pick up the terrorists, were in place and the system couldn't react fast enough to save thousands of people.

The conversion of the government to the system we are heading for will save thousands of lives and defeat our enemies. People have to join in the effort and quit their petty complaining. We must be one country.

I don't see 9/11 as a failure of airport security. It was a failure of intelligence to not uncover this plot. Another failure what the ease of gaining access to the cockpit. That has been fixed with the hardened cockpit doors. The other failure was that everyone was always told to cooperate with the hijackers. That ended with United 93.

The key is stopping the terrorists well before they get to the airport. If someone has a bomb at the airport, I think it is already too late. A terrorist isn't going to allow himself to be captured easily. He is likely going to detonate the bomb at the checkpoint which will cause a lot of damage too.

Yes trevor, no American citizen should ever complain about the treatment they receive at the hands of government employees. No Americsn should vote until the government tells them who to vote for. No American should stand against tyranny. No American should act like they have Constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Instead, all Americans should just comply with any rule the government comes up with, even if it's unreasonable, impractical, illegal, immoral, or unconstitutional.

Because that's how this country was started, right? The Colonists just complied with the English. And that's how minorities and women got their rights, by complying with laws that barred them from the freedoms enjoyed by the white male majority.